The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal)

by Walpow, Nathan

  “I don’t like poinsettias,” Rand said.

  “Nor do I. But a whole lot of people do. Lots of money to be made there.”

  “You think?” Lyle said.

  I nodded. “Lots. Enough to set somebody up for life maybe. Or several somebodies.” I caught Gina’s eye. “Maybe enough to be a motive for murder.”

  “That seems silly,” Rand said.

  “The way I figure it, somebody else was involved in the discovery. They wanted a cut. Brenda said no. Dick said no. So this somebody whacked both of them.” I looked at Gina. Her purse sat on a bench. Her hands were behind her back.

  I twirled dramatically and spoke directly to Eugene Rand. “You gave yourself away, Eugene, by showing up at Dicks house. Why would you do that, and lie about being a member of the club, unless you wanted to check up and see if anyone suspected you?”

  “I came because I thought I might get a clue about Brenda’s murderer. If you can play detective, why can’t I?”

  I unleashed an accusatory finger. “You were the one who discovered the plant with the strange leaves, right here in this very conservatory. And you, loyal employee that you are, ran right to Brenda with it.”

  “That’s not true,” Rand said.

  “And Brenda said, thanks, Eugene, that’s a good boy, now go back to your watering. And then she went ahead and took the plant you’d shown her and tried to make a whole lot of money off it. You felt betrayed, didn’t you, Eugene? Here the woman you’d been so loyal to was totally blowing you off. Not to mention that you had lust in your heart for her.”

  “You’re making this up.” He looked frantically over at Lyle. “He’s making this up, honest. I never saw the plant until much later.”

  “You little shit,” Lyle said. “You killed my buddy Dick.” He bounded over to Rand, grabbed each of his shoulders in a meaty paw, and squeezed.

  “Ow,” Rand whined. “You’re hurting me”

  “Lyle, please,” I said. “I did ask you to come here so we could apprehend the killer, but lets not be violent. There’s been enough violence.” Lyle stopped squeezing but maintained his grip. “So then, Eugene,” I went on, “you bided your time. You waited until the proper psychological moment, until the new poinsettia with the spliced-in gene from the plant you discovered had been delivered to the propagator. You waited until Brenda was just about to go back to Madagascar, the land she loved, the land where the plant originated, and it all fell together for you in a murderous epiphany, and you accosted her in her own home and forced a Euphorbia abdelkuri down her throat. For years you’d pined for her, and now, in a last symbolic act, you plunged—”

  “No, no, none of this happened. I loved her, I never would have wanted anything to—”

  “And after you were done you left the remains of the murder weapon at my house and called the police to tell them it was there, and then a couple of days later you offed Dick too, most imaginatively, I might add, and—”

  “No, no. You’re wrong. I wouldn’t hurt anyone. Anyway, I never even heard of you until you came up here to the conservatory, and by that time they’d already found the plant at your place. You told me that yourself. You called it the death plant.”

  “I did?” I shut up and made myself look confused. “Hmm. I guess you’re right.” I turned to Gina. “And it sounded so good.” Back to the others. “Okay, plan B.”

  “What the fuck?” Lyle said.

  “What the fuck indeed,” I said. “You did it, Lyle.”

  27

  LYLE STARED AT ME LIKE I’D JUST GROWN AN EXTRA NOS-tril. “That’s bullshit and you know it.”

  “I think not,” I replied. “Most of what I said was true. Except that it was you who wanted a cut, and that Brenda didn’t show the plant to Dick. He showed it to her. He got it from you. You’re always giving away plants, Lyle. But when you found out they were going to make money off this one, you wanted a cut.”

  “I don’t have to stand here and listen to—”

  “How come you told me you’d never seen a striped milii?”

  “What? I never—”

  “Sure you did, and that was your big mistake. It just seemed a little funny to me. Austin and Sam each had one, so it couldn’t have been that much of a secret. But you said you’d never heard of it.” I threw Gina a little smile. “Best friends share everything, Lyle. So why wouldn’t Dick have shared his nifty find with you?”

  Eugene Rand was trying to extricate himself from Lyle’s grasp. Lyle held on, casually, with just enough grip on Rand’s shirt to keep the little man from escaping. “I must have misunderstood. Yeah, Dick showed me—”

  “Just shut up a minute. You might as well shut up, because too much points at you for it to be anyone else.”

  “Like what? Not that it matters, since I didn’t do it.”

  Rand squirmed. His eyes darted around, looking for an escape route. Another fluorescent was blinking, throwing fleeting shadows across his face.

  “Let him go, Lyle,” I said.

  He glanced down at Rand, seemed unaware he’d been holding him. He didn’t let go though. “Fuck a duck, Joe, I don’t know what’s gotten into you.”

  “How long did it take you to collect the wasps? Everyone knows how afraid of them I am. But you live out there in the boonies. Tarantula hawk country.”

  “What wasps?”

  “Although that part I think I understand. I was poking around, I could have found something out, you wanted to scare me. The thing I don’t get is, why pick on me earlier on? Why plant the abdelkuri at my place? And the roll of plant ties in my gym bag. You slipped that in at Brenda’s funeral, right?”

  His denial surprised me. It surprised me because it wasn’t a denial at all. “You were handy,” he said quietly. “You lived near her. It wasn’t anything personal. Had to get the cops interested in someone else.”

  Nobody spoke. I’d suddenly gotten what I was looking for, and I didn’t know what to do with it. Finally I found my voice. “Those little abdelkuris you showed me the other day. That obviously wasn’t the first batch you grew. What happened to the others from the bunch the death plant came from? You couldn’t leave them lying around where the cops could find them.”

  “I put them in a Dumpster in North Hollywood. Really hurt to do that.” He seemed deep in thought. Now was the time when he was supposed to break down sobbing, babbling something about having a right to the money, explaining how he’d hatched his plan, et cetera, et cetera.

  Instead, Lyle snatched up Eugene Rand and threw him at me.

  Rand tumbled through the air like a rag doll, yelling at the top of his lungs, while I marveled at the casual manner in which Lyle had tossed him. He rotated in midair and smashed into me at right angles. I fell backward. A bench hit just below my butt and I landed in a cactus patch, with Rand atop me. Spines made themselves at home in my back, my legs, my arms. My head crashed into the bench top. I saw stars. My vision blurred. I heard one, two heavy footsteps.

  Atop me, Rand swept his limbs wildly. “Get off,” I said. The footsteps abruptly stopped.

  Rand continued his scrabbling. I pushed him off me. Off the bench too. He grunted when he hit the ground. I sat up and scanned the area, which wouldn’t stay still long enough to be scanned.

  Eugene Rand, the poor little guy I’d gotten involved in this charade to get Lyle off his guard, lay on his stomach amidst the gravel covering the ground.

  Lyle loomed over Gina, his huge arms over his head, like a Kodiak bear on Wild Kingdom preparing to do something dreadful. “No!” I yelled.

  My vision snapped back to focus, my heart back to its usual location in my chest. Lyle’s arms were indeed up in the air, but as a reaction to the gun Gina had pointed at him.

  “Time to call the cops,” she said.

  I checked on Rand. He’d sat up and his back was pressed against a vertical two-by-four holding up a sagging piece of bench. A small trickle of blood decorated his head, partially obscuring the map of Argentina, but o
ther than that he seemed okay.

  I extracted the two longest cactus spines from my left forearm and moved over next to Gina. “You brought the plant with you to Brenda’s, didn’t you, Lyle? You went over there to ask one more time for a cut of the poinsettia money, and you brought her the abdelkuri as a little bribe. Did you know Brenda hated getting gifts?”

  His eyes darted toward the entryway as if gauging his chances of escaping through it. “Everybody likes a freebie now and then.”

  “You killed her because she turned down a plant? Seems a little excessive.”

  Another glance at the entrance. “She said she couldn’t be bribed and she had one that was ten times bigger anyway. When I asked for a cut of the poinsettia, she picked up the abdelkuri and threw it at me. I just lost it. I smacked her, and then I saw the piece lying there and—”

  “And Dick figured out you did it. That’s what he was going to tell me when I came over after Brenda’s funeral.”

  “I asked him not to.”

  “And when he said he would anyway, you dropped by and hit him on the head and nailed him up to make it look like some crazy was on the loose. Your own best friend.”

  “It was kind of Magdas idea.”

  “Then you acted all upset about Dick.”

  “I was upset. My best buddy dead and everything.”

  Gina broke in. “Can’t we talk about all this later? I think it’s time to call the cops.”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  I picked up her purse and reached in for the phone. Magda Tillis strolled out of the entryway with a double-barreled shotgun pointed our way. I froze.

  Gina’s back was to her. “Come on, Joe, I know you hate cell phones, but make an exception.”

  “Uh.”

  “I’m not going to like this, am I?”

  “No.”

  “Please place your pistol on the ground,” Magda said.

  “That would be Lyle’s wife, wouldn’t it?” Gina said.

  “Yup,” I said.

  “My guess is she has something that shoots pointed at me.”

  “Right again. You’d better do what she says.”

  Gina knelt and carefully complied. She placed the gun on the ground. Right in the middle of one of the puddles left over from Rand’s watering.

  “What the hell’d you do that for?” Lyle said.

  “If we can’t have it, neither can you,” Gina said.

  “Fuck a duck.” He glanced longingly at the puddle before moving over to stand next to his wife.

  “You’re making a big mistake, Magda,” I said. “So far you’re not guilty of anything other than protecting your husband, just like any wife would do. Oh, and locking me in the greenhouse. That was kind of bad. At least I assume it was you. The person I saw running away was way too small to be Lyle. But this gun stuff, this puts it into the realm of…the realm of… help me out here, Gi.”

  “Aiding and abetting,” Gina said. “There’s a definite aid and abetment going on here.”

  “Quiet, you!” Magda said. “I should have listened to my husband. I should have just let him kill you. But I thought there had been enough killing. I thought we could scare you away. This was incorrect. Lyle!”

  “Yes, hon?”

  “What should we do with this interloper?”

  “I guess we’re gonna have to kill him after all. And his girlfriend too.”

  Whoa. “Kill him”? A day or two back I’d thought maybe I was next in line, but that was all kind of nebulous. Now someone with a shotgun was talking about using it. Where was Sonny when I needed him?

  “Yes, you are correct.” Magda said. “But this will be the end of the killing. For when it is done we will flee. Is now the time, my dearest?”

  “Its as good a time as any,” Lyle replied. He reached for the shotgun.

  Someone else came barreling into view. Someone with a map of Argentina on his head. “Murderers!” Eugene Rand wailed, a millisecond before crashing into the Tillises.

  If he hadn’t had the element of surprise, if he hadn’t seemed such an inconsequential little man, Lyle probably would have knocked him away with one swat of his beefy arm. But Lyle had clearly forgotten about him and tumbled backward, falling heavily on top of Magda. She screamed. The shotgun went off, more loudly than I could have imagined, and flew from her grip. Glass shattered above and rained down upon us.

  The trained commando team of Joe and Gina jumped into action. So did the homicidal duo. Everyone but Eugene Rand dived for the shotgun. He was laid out on the ground with his now-much-bloodier head up against a cinder block.

  Legs and arms and bodies. English, Spanish, and Hungarian expletives. Another shotgun blast, and shredded succulents sailing through the air. Magda fleeing into the entry corridor, with Gina nipping at her heels.

  Suddenly there was no one between me and the shotgun. I vaguely recalled that shotguns tended to have two shells, which would mean this one had shot its wad, but it still seemed like a good idea to grab it. Holding tight to the barrel end, I rolled to my feet, leaving Lyle lying on the ground in a patch of weeds.

  I leapt to where I could guard the way out and held on to the shotgun like a baseball bat. My stance was better than Eugene Rand’s had been with the euphorbia the other day, but not much. I waved the weapon back and forth, daring him to challenge me.

  He came to his knees, then his feet. He rushed me. I swung for the seats and connected with his left kidney.

  He roared in pain, jumped back, and clutched his battered side. From outside came the sounds of a scuffle.

  Lyle regarded me with murder in his eyes, which I thought was fair since he had it everywhere else in his body. He came at me again. I took a left-handed stance. Big swing and a miss. But close.

  He abruptly turned and ran toward the front door. I knew it was locked, and if he thought about it he’d realize the same, since I’d made him go around back when he arrived. But he didn’t think about it, or he didn’t care, and for all I knew the door would open from the inside. I took off after him, into the dim light farthest from the fluorescents.

  He had five paces on me when his mighty shoulder crashed into the front door. It bowed but remained shut. “Damn it to hell,” he muttered, staring at the door like it had personally insulted him. He turned, snatched an eight-inch pot that was home to some nondescript cactus, and hurled it at the wall. Glass splintered. Chain-link fence confronted him. He made an animal noise.

  I almost had him then, but he saw me coming and took off. He ended up in the same blind alley in which Eugene Rand had taken a poke at me with a euphorbia.

  I wondered if maybe this particular shotgun could handle more than two shells. But, given what I knew about guns, I’d probably blow myself up trying to find out, and I didn’t think Lyle would tell me if I asked. “Give it up, Lyle,” I said. “It’ll make it easier for you if you give up now.”

  “No,” he said. “It’ll make it easier for you.” He picked up a gorgeous crested golden barrel cactus, with inch-long yellow spines and a body twisted into a beautiful otherworldly brain shape. It was the biggest crest of that species I’d ever seen. At least it was until he threw it at me and I ducked and it crashed into a saguaro and broke into a half dozen pieces.

  It was quickly followed by a Stapeliantbus neronis in a six-inch pot, a lumpish yet desirable succulent milkweed. This missile disintegrated on the bench top, generating enough cuttings to supply the entire CCCC. “Lyle, you’re ruining some amazing plants,” I said, always careful to keep things in perspective.

  “What do I care? I can’t have any plants in the big house.” A stunning Pachypodium brevicaule whooshed at me. Picture a potato with big yellow flowers. I batted it aside with the shotgun.

  I had to end it. Not only was he decimating the collection, but one of these times he was going to connect, and I would be picking spines from my eyes and not just my forearms. I took a step toward him. “Na-na-na-na-na,” I said in a voice that would have infuriated any e
ight-year-old.

  Lyle was considerably older than that. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked, launching a volley of hooked-spined mammillaria.

  Another two steps. “Magda wears army boots,” I said.

  His face turned vicious and he came at me. I ducked his outstretched hands, extended my arm to its limit, and swept the shotgun into a mighty arc. I caught the hanger of the pot containing the giant Euphorbia antisyphilitica that Rand had almost sent down upon us. It teetered once, twice, and, just as Lyle’s hands encircled my throat, it slipped off its water pipe and descended onto his head.

  Something made a cracking noise—bone or plastic, I wasn’t sure which. Lyle’s hands dropped from my neck. He said, “Oof,” or something similar, and collapsed unconscious at my feet.

  I ran outside. Gina had Magda in a pretty damned good full nelson. “Lyle?” she asked.

  “He was tired,” I said. “He’s taking a nap.”

  28

  I RUSHED BACK INSIDE TO CHECK ON RAND. AS I KNELT AThis side he sat up and took a swing at me. I caught his fist in my hand. “Eugene,” I said. “It’s me. Joe.”

  He slowly focused. “Did we get ’em?”

  “We got ’em. I’m sorry I acted like I thought you did it. I’m sorry I put you through that.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We got ’em.”

  I helped him up, pointed him at the first-aid kit, and called the police. They said they’d send somebody and page Burns at home. While they were at it, I said, could they send some paramedics for Rand? He’d patched himself up and was wandering around, righting overturned pots, but I couldn’t tell if the daze he was in was any different from his normal one.

  As I waited for reinforcements I stood over Lyle with the shotgun at the ready. Merlin the mule popped into my mind. I wondered who would take care of him now, with his owners in, as Lyle had called it, “the big house.”